Who Invented Football

The invention of football dates back thousands of years, and every continent has at least one ancient game that could be described as football, but most have very little to do with each other. Dictionaries describe football as a team game that involves kicking a ball around a field, though some games such as rugby and gridiron are mostly passing games with minimal kicking.

In Asia, the Chinese game of cuju spread from 200 AD to Korea and Japan becoming a popular sport, whilst in Australia, a game invented by aboriginals called marn grock was adopted by white settlers and became one of Australia’s national sports, Australian Rules Football. In Europe a game invented in the Middle East was adopted by Romans and used a pigs head that was kicked into a goal area, and this game was repeatedly reinvented by medieval people throughout Europe.

Modern football usually refers to soccer or any of the rugby derivatives, so the question of who invented the sport is more difficult since both codes developed separately, in different countries, and at different times. Football from Europe, which in the US is known as soccer is directly descended from the original Roman game, but of course is much more civilized, the ball these days is a rubber bladder filled with air and then covered with either leather or synthetic material.

The very first football club in the UK has been conclusively dated to 1824 when a Scotsman named John Hope founded a football club in Edinburgh which continued until 1841, whilst the first English football club wasn’t founded until 1857. The rules of association football, the name chosen for the game weren’t written down until the 1860s when a group of English schools finally decided to cooperate so that inter-school games could be played regularly.

American football by comparison seems to originate in older colonial games of football that were imported by the first settlers, and in the American colonies games of ballown were popular long before the first football clubs were established in Britain. New England colleges in the early 1800s, and possibly even earlier used to organize games of ballown at the beginning of the academic year.

The modern game of American football was finally invented in 1880 by Walter Camp, the coach of Yale’s football team. Intercollege football had been played in the US for several years, but under different rules with much larger teams. Walter Camp can rightly be considered the true inventor of modern American football, and in 1951 was posthumously inducted into the first College Football Hall of Fame on the coaching category in recognition of his role.